Basic Concepts of Information Science
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CHAPTER 4 Basic concepts of information science Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? T. S. Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock' It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field. Claude Shannon Information is information, not matter or energy. Norbert Wiener Introduction In this chapter, we will consider some of the basic concepts of the information sciences: information and knowledge, documents and collections, relevance and 'aboutness', and information use and users. It may seem strange to find that there is still debate about the nature of these very fundamental ideas: as strange, perhaps, as finding a doctor who had no idea what a 'disease' or a 'treatment' was, or an engineer who had no idea what was meant by 'materials' or 'design'. That is not to say that there need be a perfect understanding of these concepts; doctors treated diseases, sometimes quite effectively, long before they had any realistic idea of what caused them. But most professions expect to have some understanding of the basic concepts with which they deal. 'Information', 'knowledge', 'document', and so on, are tricky concepts, which can have many different meanings, and can be understood in many different ways. These are not just academic matters; they can have a real effect on professional practice. What someone understands by 'knowledge', for example, and its relation to 'information', will determine how they go about the practical business of 'knowledge management'. And what a librarian or information specialist understands by a 'document' will determine what sort of things they keep on their shelves or in their computer files. 64 INTRODUCTION TO INFORMATION SCIENCE BASIC CONCEPTS OF INFORMATION SCIENCE 65 We begin by looking at perhaps the most fundamental of concepts: information ... almost every scientific discipline uses the concept of information within its own itself, and knowledge. context and with regard to specific phenomena . There are many concepts of information, and they are embedded in more or less explicit theoretical structures. Information and knowledge Shannon and Wiener and I Varied conceptions of information: 'information is ...' Have found it confusing to try .(Iff OttA MtlyV {!•*• f- fragmented knowledge (Bertie Brookes) To measure sagacity knowledge packaged for a user (CILIP Body of Professional Knowledge) And channel capacity meaningful data (Luciano Floridi) By £ pj log p; Anonymous, Behavioural Science, 1962, 7 (July issue), 395 an assemblage of data in a comprehensible form capable of communication and use (John Feather and Paul Sturges) Information, argued John Feather and Paul Sturges in the 1997 Routledge patterns of self-organized complexity, providing meaning-in-context and promoting understanding (David Bawden) International Encyclopaedia of Information and Library Science, is probably the communicated signs (Claude Shannon) most used, and the least precisely understood, term in the library and information world. a change of structure (Nick Belkin and Steve Robertson) The best way to understand the concept of 'information' has been debated a stimulus originating in one system that affects the interpretation by another system of either the second system's relationship to the first or of for many years; the more so as the ideas of the 'information age' and 'information the relationship the two systems share with a given environment (Andrew society' have gained currency. The 'commonsense' meaning of the word relates Madden) to knowledge, news or intelligence, given and received, so that someone becomes a difference which makes a difference (Gregory Bateson) 'informed'. But the word has had many different meanings over the years; its some pattern of organization of matter and energy given meaning by a entry in the full Oxford English Dictionary of 2010, which shows its usage over living being (Marcia Bates) time, runs to nearly 10,000 words. an abstract concept, which manifests itself by organizing systems (Tom Even within an information science context, the term has been understood Stonier) with different connotations, as we shall see later. To show the variety of ideas available, information has been explained, among many other things, as being as shown in the box below. This subset of the many We will now look briefly at the use of the information concept in different definitions and explanations available shows their diversity, from simple to contexts; specifically in the physical and biological sciences, as opposed to its complex. Some relate information to concepts such as 'data' or 'knowledge', which more familiar usage in the social and information sciences. We can only consider then themselves require explanation. Some set the idea of information firmly in this in outline, referring the reader to more detailed accounts below. the context of communication between people; others see it as a more general concept, to do with structure, pattern, and organization. In this chapter, we can Information: physical, biological, social do no more than mention some of the more influential and interesting ideas put The idea of information as a feature of the physical world arose through studies forward, allowing the reader to follow these up, and to find others, via the of the thermodynamic property known as entropy, through the work of physicists references. such as Ludwig Boltzmann and Leo Szilard. Entropy, usually understood as a Despite much effort, there is still no consensus as to what information 'really measure of the disorder of a physical system, is also associated with the extent is', still less any 'theory of information', usefully applicable in all contexts; we of our knowledge of it; put crudely, if a system is disordered, we have little will look at two theories for which this claim may be made later. The problem knowledge of where its components are, or what they are doing. A formal is made worse by the fact that the word is used rather differently in many mathematical link may be made between entropy and information, when different subject areas; for an early, and very influential, overview of this information is defined in the way required by Shannon's theory, discussed below. diversity, see Machlup and Mansfield (1983). As Capurro and Hjerland (2003, Analysis of the relation between information and physical entropy led Rolf 356 and 396) say: Landauer to propose his well known aphorism 'information is physical'. 66 INTRODUCTION TO INFORMATION SCIENCE BASIC CONCEPTS OF INFORMATION SCIENCE 67 Information must always be instantiated in some physical system; for the kinds • Information 1 - the pattern of organization of matter and energy of information of interest to the information sciences, this would be a human • Information 2 - some pattern of organization of matter and energy given brain or some kind of document. meaning by a living being The idea of information as a physical entity has received increasing attention • Data 1 - that portion of the entire information environment available to a in recent decades. Information has been proposed as a fundamental aspect of sensing organism that is taken in, or processed, by that organism the physical universe, on a par with - or even more fundamental than - matter • Data 2 - information selected or generated by human beings for social and energy. One of the originators of this approach was the American physicist purposes John Wheeler, who coined the phrase 'it from bit' to express the idea that • Knowledge - information given meaning and integrated with other contents physical reality is, in some way, generated from information; his views are of understanding. surveyed, critiqued and extended in papers in Barrow, Davies and Harper (2004). Currently active proponents are Lee Smolin, who has suggested that the idea of This model, while all-encompassing and one of the more ambitious attempts at space itself may be replaceable by a 'web of information', and David Deutsch, integrating information in all its contexts, remains at a conceptual and qualitative who proposes that information flow - essentially what changes occur in what level, and introduces a potentially confusing multiplicity of forms of information order - determines the nature of everything that is. 'The physical world is a and similar entities. multiverse', writes Deutsch (2011, 304), 'and its structure is determined by how Others have denied that it is at all useful to try to make such a direct link. information flows in it. In many regions of the multiverse, information flows in Cole (1994) and Hjorland (2007), for example, argue against any equating of quasi-autonomous streams called histories, one of which we call our universe'. the idea of information as an objective and measurable 'thing' to the kind of Similarly, in biology, the discovery of the genetic code and associated information of interest in library and information science; this information, they developments in molecular biology have led to the idea that information is a argue, is subjective in nature, having meaning to a person in a particular context. fundamental biological property, and that the transmission of information may Still others have proposed that it is an open, though interesting, question. One be as fundamental - or more fundamental - a property of living things as of the authors of this book has suggested that we may see information in human, metabolism, reproduction, and other signifiers of life. biological and physical realms as being related through emergent properties in Fascinating though these ideas are, we cannot pursue them further here; complex systems; one does not look for direct equivalences, but for more subtle interested readers should begin with the overviews given by Gleick (2011), linkages (Bawden, 2007a; 2007b). Floridi (2010), Davies and Gregersen (2010), Vedral (2010) and von Baeyer It seems clear that the question as to whether there can be any generally (2004).